


Blackout

by orphan_account



Category: Jericho of Scotland Yard
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-14
Updated: 2012-03-14
Packaged: 2017-11-01 23:06:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/362271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They barely spoke in those days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blackout

A/N: I've mucked with the children's ages a bit because I couldn’t see this scenario with kids running around, so I hope the Harvey family will forgive me for knocking their kid!canon all to hell.  
Disclaimer: PBS and Mystery own them. I do not.

They came home, her beloved Clive and this thin, dark man who dogged his heels, who smoked in her living room at 3 o'clock in the morning. She didn't argue his presence there, one small suitcase shoved under the armchair, eyes flashing in the light as the train went by and rattled their little apartment's windows.

Clive's letters had been short. Rita was under no delusions she'd married a poet, but his letters had been short: I'm alive, I'm in France. I'm in Germany. I love you. The war's over, I'm coming home. She had tidied the small flat and opened her door for him, only to find a wraith at his back.

He kissed her like he was drowning and she was air, and then said, his fingers still in her hair, "This is Michael Jericho." Who was staring round her shabby living room as though it was a prison camp, full of cover for potential snipers.

Questions: Who is this man to you? What is he doing here? Has he no home of his own to go to? Instead of asking, she pulled an extra blanket from the cupboard. In bed, she touched a small scar on Clive's arm, and he traced the curves of her hips with hands so rough and hard she almost didn't recognize them.

Clive slept that night. She didn't. It was too new. She'd gotten used to her nights without his breathing beside her.

At 3 o'clock in the morning, the third day, she gave up on slumber and put on her worn old slippers and the silk gown Clive had given her on their wedding night, now going out at the left elbow. She stepped out into the living room and nearly gasped at the shape sitting in the small chair by the window.

She wasn't used to him, either, yet.

"He saved my life." The voice was raspy, as though he'd been sleeping, or crying. Something twisted inside her, and she sat down, atop his rumpled sheet on the sofa, close enough to hear him breathing but too far to take his hand.

They sat there, quiet, as the train rattled by.

"Yes," she finally said, "he does that."

They would leave in the daytime, come back: Rita tired from standing all day in front of the shirt press, Clive and Michael bruised and out of breath. They would eat whatever she could find to cook and listen to some music. Clive would go to bed first, and then it was just her. And him.

This pattern of overnervous chatter, they developed later, in the larger flat, with the children about. They barely spoke in those days, as though they were afraid the war would come back if they raised their voices.

"He never wrote me about you," she said one night, and he just nodded.

They barely spoke in those days, as though the war had burned all language out of them.

"What was it like, here?" he asked, lighting a cigarette for her.

"Dark," was all she could come up with. She meant the blackouts, mostly.

"I'm told many people went to the country."

"I couldn't imagine leaving London."

They barely spoke in those days, because it seemed the best way of getting to know one another. Marry a silent man, and learn to pick up silent clues: that this man Clive had brought home was important to him, that he was damaged.

That he needed a safe place.

It was a month after they'd come back, a month in which she'd learned to sleep beside her husband again and Michael had smiled, once, when Clive crashed through the door dragging their flatmate, who was bleeding from several places at once.

"What the hell?" She jumped up from the bed, rushed into the living room and took Michael's arm, only to drop it like a hot potato when he hissed through his teeth. Clive bundled him onto the sofa. They were, of course, bickering:

"Bloody mother hen, don't need you clucking over me …"

"Then don't get yourself into fights you can't win, you stupid bastard …"

Rita put her hands on her hips and shouted. "Both of you. Shut it! Clive, does he need a doctor?"

"I'm right here, for Christ's sakes …"

She ignored him. "Doctor?"

"No. He's just bashed up a bit. Plus, he near bit me when I tried to take him to hospital."

"Brilliant." She fixed her best stare on Michael who, to his credit, backed down. "Sit. There. Don't. Move."

Clive went into the kitchen. She heard him strike a match, the sucking-in sound of the stove lighting up, and she followed him in to put on the kettle. He fumbled through the cupboards and she saw his hands shaking a little, grabbed his elbow, pulled him back. The hissing of the hot water covered their words.

"He was to be married," Clive explained, his gentle face creased with pain. "Rita, when we came back we went to his place first, forgive me, but he wanted to see her so badly and he dragged me along."

He went on, and she pictured the scene. Michael, jolly at the anticipated reunion, pulling taciturn Clive in his wake. Redheaded Maeve, about whom Michael had talked nonstop all through France, who turned from the door great with child.

Who said to the man who considered her the love of his life only that it had been too long to wait.

"She could have written," Clive said, anger rising. "She could have told him she'd married, instead of letting him live through the war and cross the ocean hoping to see her again." He cursed, and Rita didn't admonish him.

"What happened tonight?"

"He showed up at the station like that." Clive clenched his fists. "Wouldn't talk about it. I assumed he got drunk, tried to go by her place. He's been beaten, I know that for certain."

Clive rubbed a hand over his face, weary. He'd been on a three-day stakeout when this happened, hadn't eaten, barely slept. "Let me patch him up, best I can," she murmured, taking the boiling water off the heat. "You need to rest. It's near on 4 o'clock in the morning."

She poured water into a glass bowl and gathered bandages, liniment, small scissors from the cupboard below the sink. Clive went into the bedroom and shut the door, leaving them alone. She'd married wisely.

He was cut over his left eye, bruised about the face, she knew how to repair this but she had no words for the way Michael looked at her, as though begging her to understand. He unbuttoned his shirt and winced as she pulled it off his shoulders; there was a black mark starting along his ribs, and a deep gash at the base of his neck.

"Knife?" she asked. It was surprisingly difficult to keep her voice steady.

He nodded, eyes downcast.

She cleaned the cut, her fingers hesitating at the way he bit his lip at her touch. As she was wrapping the bandage around him, over the tight muscle of his shoulder and under the opposite arm he spoke.

"I had a few drinks." She had turned down the lamp and could only see in the reflection from the window how very bright his eyes were. "I wanted to talk to her, ask her why …"

"And her husband was at home," she said softly, wiping at the mark on his forehead, fist-shaped.

He nodded, and a tremor shook him.

Sudden and fierce, she clasped her arms around him, pressed her lips to his rough cheek, the bone hard beneath too-thin skin. To his wet, closed eyes and hot forehead, and finally his slack, tender mouth.

She'd held her sister as they put her husband in the ground, had flowers delivered to friends when children came back from Germany in boxes, in pieces. Death had mechanisms, procedures.

She lived a proper life, she knew the proper ways to deal with dying.

But Clive came home. The bombs had missed her. Michael crossed an ocean thinking only of his love, to find her gone. And there was no procedure for living after that, no right way to keep going.

"I love you," she whispered, not knowing anything else to say that could comfort. It was what she'd said to the boys in the hospital where she volunteered, the ones who cried and shook and asked for their mothers or sweethearts in the fever before the end.

Pressed, it would have been impossible to define it, what she felt. But this man was underneath her roof and had survived unimaginable things, and talked a little in the dark hours when everything, even the silence, no planes, no bombs, was new and strange.

Love came closest. It was the only thing she could think to say to tell him he was not alone, and she hoped he'd understand. She didn't have a language for the tightening of her heart.

He let her go when the train rushed by for the second time, turning away before apologizing, and she shushed him.

He had come to them needing somewhere free of questions he wasn't prepared to answer, where someone would fetch him a plate and not complain about the time of day or night, only tease, only talk, only love. He had come to them needing to continue whatever it had been that had kept him alive in Germany, in France, in a war she couldn’t fathom about which they barely spoke.

He had come to them needing a safe place.

Didn't they bloody well all.

The next day, he brought home fish and chips for them, laid it out almost shyly on the table and told them he'd taken a flat of his own and would be moving his things out. She made the appropriate noises, told him not to rush, but his back was straight in the chair, and she knew, then, that the previous night was something they'd never talk about.

She was surprised, when she woke in the dark and walked out looking for him, how very much it stung to find him gone.

A.


End file.
